The debate about school education
in India has focused on many things – enrolment, retention, learning outcomes,
teacher preparedness, vocational training, etc, but over the last few decades,
we seem to have taken one thing for granted.
This is our definition of the term “access”, i.e., the availability of a
school to every child. Since the 1970s, when
the 2nd All India Education Survey took place, this concept has been
defined in terms of physical proximity; in other words, the measure of a
school’s availability to a child lies in its distance from her home, with the
idea being that a school should be provided within the immediate neighbourhood. Every government policy or law thus
prescribes access in such language – a primary school within 1 kilometre of the
residence of a child, an upper primary school within 3 kilometres, and a
secondary school within 5 kilometres.
In a soon-to-be-published
NUEPA/World Bank study on teachers in the Indian education system, Vimala
Ramachandran et al[1] analyse
DISE data to show that about one-third of all elementary schools have less than
50 children enrolled, while 11 percent of primary and 14 percent of secondary
schools have two teachers or less. At secondary level, only 3.3 percent
schools have all the five subject teachers and head teacher prescribed. Worse,
fully a quarter of all government secondary schools operate out of two
classrooms or less.
The exponential increase in the number
of schools over the last decade as a result of the impact of programmes like Sarva
Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA)
and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has led
to an increase in the number of schools with less than optimal infrastructure
or numbers of children and/or teachers. What
the foregoing numbers indicate is that the rapid expansion of the school system
in the last few years has not been fully efficient on the ground.
Additionally, learning outcomes
continue to remain a matter of concern despite the substantial increase in
infrastructure, teacher appointments and enrolment. Each succeeding ASER[2]
report has highlighted the continued decline in learning levels and the
increasing shift to private schools in rural areas, notwithstanding the opening
of many more State schools. Worryingly,
the number of children in Class 5 unable to read a Class 2 text has actually
increased from 47 percent in 2006 to 52 percent in 2014, even though the number
of elementary schools increased from 1 million to 1.45 million during the same
period!
This single minded expansion of
school infrastructure has also contributed directly to the non-availability of enough
trained and qualified teachers for all the schools and classes being opened
under various programmes. At the
elementary school level alone, there are 500,000 teacher vacancies, with
another 500,000 being needed to meet the norms stipulated by the Right to
Education Act; existing teacher training colleges are simply unable to produce
the required number of graduates. Subject
teachers are increasingly hard to find. When
combined with the well-known issues of teacher absenteeism, sub-contracting,
etc, this effectively means that enough skilled teachers are simply not
available to children in the classroom.
For the teachers themselves, this
unprecedented expansion of the school system has not been without grief. Apart from the personal difficulties of being
posted to remote and inaccessible areas, those posted to single or two-teacher
schools find themselves deprived of any opportunity for peer learning and thus,
professional and personal growth. And taking
leave, attending training programmes away from school, or being deputed for
several miscellaneous government duties, nearly always means leaving students without
a teacher, further impacting already poor learning outcomes in the classroom.
All things considered, it appears
that in practice the concept of access has been reduced to the ability to
access a building instead a fully functional school. This implies the need to re-examine our fundamental
definition of access, and define it instead as the ability to attend a school
with appropriate infrastructure and adequate numbers of qualified teachers, and
to be enabled to achieve predefined learning outcomes, even if such a school is
not within the existing norms for distance. Such a definition would compel us
to look beyond availability of mere infrastructure, and focus on all the additional
conditions that are essential to improve learning outcomes, thus changing the
focus of the debate from mere physical proximity to school provisioning, empowerment
of staff and administrators, and learning achievements.
Such a discussion is neither new nor
unknown; in a policy brief published in 2009, the DFID-supported Consortium for
Research on Education, Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE) had defined
“meaningful access” as “…access (that) requires high attendance rates,
progression through grades with little or no repetition, and learning outcomes
that confirm that basic skills are being mastered”[3]. Writing in 2012, Rashmi Diwan of NUEPA pointed
out how “…poor connectivity, lack of interaction with peer group of teachers
and lack of need-based training to teachers coupled with inadequate and poor
quality of school facilities”[4]
made teaching in such schools far more complex.
If a new parameter of access is
accepted, it would be possible to consolidate scattered existing schools into
whole and viable institutions that are fully staffed and infrastructurally
complete, yielding economies of scale as well as gains in efficiency. In cases where the school is located beyond
distances as currently understood, transport facilities or transport vouchers
could be provided to eliminate associated costs. Clearly this is not an option that would be
appropriate for very young children – it may still be relevant to retain the 1
km norm for primary school. However for
children enrolled in classes 6 onwards, when the need for specialised subject
teachers kicks in, it could potentially change the nature of schooling, while
significantly impacting learning outcomes.
At the same time, while government
accounts for just over three-fourths of all elementary schools, at secondary
and higher secondary level, schools under private management are 37 percent and
40 percent respectively. In other words,
there are far more secondary schools available outside the government system,
accounting for nearly 40 percent of all students enrolled. It may also be possible to explore the use of
these schools to admit children who would otherwise have accessed ill-equipped
government schools, through the use of government-issued vouchers that cover
the cost of tuition, books, uniforms, etc.
Some pilots involving such vouchers have been tried in India, notably by
the Centre for Civil Society (www.ccsindia.org),
with some success.
The ongoing review of the National
Education Policy by the Ministry of HRD offers an opportunity to reconsider some
of these issues. In a country that aspires to take its place on the world
stage, education remains one of the most important sectors and needs immediate
attention; we cannot continue to plan on the basis of concepts and philosophies
that were relevant four decades ago.
[1]
Vimala Ramachandran, Prerna Goel Chatterjee, Nikhil Mathur, NUEPA; Aparna Ravi,
CLPR; Toby Linden, Tara Beteille, Sangeeta Dey, Sangeeta Goel, Chiraag Mehta,
The World Bank.
[4] Diwan, Rashmi (2012), Indian Small Schools - A Review of Issues and Related Concerns,
NUEPA Occasional Paper 40, National University of Educational Planning and
Administration, New Delhi.
